It will be a first in 237 years of history.
The expected appointment of Janet Yellen as Secretary of the Treasury - the US equivalent of the Minister of the Economy - of the future government of President-elect Joe Biden would make her the first woman to hold the post.
If this choice, announced by several American media on Monday, November 23, were to be confirmed, Janet Yellen would even multiply the first times.
The one who was the first woman to hold the post of director of the Fed, between 2014 and 2018, would become the first person to have successively been president of the Council of Economic Advisers of a president - under Bill Clinton -, patron of the Bank American Central and Secretary of the Treasury.
A CV to make any economist or senior official green with envy.
Left but acceptable to Republicans?
“His appointment will be welcomed by everyone, in academia, as well as foreign dignitaries and financial market players.
Everyone considers her a very experienced leader who has ensured a long period of economic stability in the United States [as director of the Fed, editor's note] ”, assured Mohamed El-Erian, president of Queen's College of the United States. 'University of Cambridge, interviewed by the Financial Times.
When she left the Federal Reserve in 2018, the US economy was in good shape "with unemployment at its lowest for 20 years," recalls the Wall Street Journal.
The Yellen option is also politically very attractive for Joe Biden.
This 74-year-old woman should meet the expectations of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party: in recent months, she has increased the number of speeches in favor of the most generous possible support plans for the economy, especially for poor households. more modest and small businesses, to face the economic crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
His profile should not, however, frighten Republicans to the point of pushing them to try to block his nomination.
"She is rather moderate on several important topics", notes the New York Times.
Janet Yellen is thus rather a supporter of free trade and had warned, last year, the United States against the temptation to widen the deficits too much.
A fiscal rigor which should earn him some points in the conservative camp.
But make no mistake.
Without being to the left of the American left, she has defended and applied throughout her career ideas that make her a personality of the progressive camp.
This economist by training studied at Yale where her mentor was James Tobin, the famous inventor of the eponymous tax on international financial transactions.
Against the obsession with inflation
Her husband, whom she met shortly after making his Federal Reserve debut as an economist in the late 1970s, is George Akerlof, a labor market economist who shared the Nobel Prize for economy, in 2001, with Joseph Stieglitz, one of the major influences for so-called left-wing economic policies in the United States.
“We have always shared the same economic ideas with my wife.
Our only disagreement is that she is perhaps a little more in favor of free trade than I am, ”said George Akerlof the year he received his prestigious award.
Janet Yellen therefore belongs to the great family of Keynesian economists, a current of thought favorable to state intervention to correct market dysfunctions.
Values that she defended throughout her career at the Central Bank, where she distinguished herself on several occasions before even taking the lead.
It is this, in particular, that is at the origin of the famous rule of the 2% inflation target, which has long been a mantra shared by most central banks around the world.
Janet Yellen began as early as the 1990s, as a member of the Board of Governors of the Fed, to criticize the Federal Reserve's stubborn desire to keep inflation as close to zero as possible. She believed that the United States could afford a small rise in prices if that injected more money into the economy to reduce unemployment.
Again she who, as early as 2005, when she headed the San Francisco branch of the Fed, was the only Central Bank official to warn about the risk of a real estate bubble bursting in the United States.
And shortly after the subprime crisis proved her right, Janet Yellen was the first at the Central Bank “to officially declare in 2008 that the country had entered a recession”, underlines the New York Times.
A year later, she was one of the few to realize that this crisis would last as her then boss, Ben Bernanke, still claimed the country would quickly get back on its feet.
Under his leadership, from 2014 on, the US Central Bank continued to distance itself from its old obsession with controlling inflation at all costs.
Janet Yellen not only argued that the Fed should also act to reduce unemployment, but it also wanted to make it an instrument to fight inequality.
An area which, until then, had never been a priority of the venerable monetary institution.
But the financial markets are especially grateful to him for "making sure that the Fed does not join the long list of central banks which have pulled the rug out from under the economic recoveries by raising rates too soon after exiting the crisis" , said Bill Nelson, former deputy director of the Fed who now works in finance, interviewed by the Wall Street Journal.
Janet Yellen didn't start raising rates until late 2015, and only very gradually.
It therefore seems to have done, so far, a faultless, managing to satisfy everyone.
Not sure that she will be able to continue her momentum if she actually becomes Joe Biden's Secretary of the Treasury.
She will occupy the most politically exposed position, underlines the New York Times.
On the one hand, it will have to put to music as quickly as possible the promises of Joe Biden to spend lavishly to get the country out of the crisis and reduce unemployment.
On the other hand, it will have to deal with Republican elected representatives in Congress who, reinforced by their good results in the November elections, will do everything to reduce the scale of a future stimulus plan in the name of the sacrosanct control of deficits.
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